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But if it is by becoming evil and inferior that the soul
produces the animal nature, the making of ox or horse was not at
the outset in its character; the reason-principle of the animal,
and the animal itself, must lie outside of the natural plan?
Inferior, yes; but outside of nature, no. The thing There [Soul
in the Intellectual] was in some sense horse and dog from the
beginning; given the condition, it produces the higher kind; let
the condition fail, then, since produce it must, it produces what
it may: it is like a skillful craftsman competent to create all
kinds of works of art but reduced to making what is ordered and
what the aptitude of his material indicates.
The power of the All-Soul, as Reason-Principle of the universe,
may be considered as laying down a pattern before the effective
separate powers go forth from it: this plan would be something
like a tentative illumining of Matter; the elaborating soul would
give minute articulation to these representations of itself;
every separate effective soul would become that towards which it
tended, assuming that particular form as the choral dancer adapts
himself to the action set down for him.
But this is to anticipate: our enquiry was How there can be
sense-perception in man without the implication that the Divine
addresses itself to the realm of process. We maintained, and
proved, that the Divine does not look to this realm but that
things here are dependent upon those and represent them and that
man here, holding his powers from Thence, is directed Thither, so
that, while sense makes the environment of what is of sense in
him, the Intellectual in him is linked to the Intellectual.
What we have called the perceptibles of that realm enter into
cognisance in a way of their own, since they are not material,
while the sensible sense here- so distinguished as dealing with
corporeal objects- is fainter than the perception belonging to
that higher world; the man of this sphere has sense-perception
because existing in a less true degree and taking only enfeebled
images of things There- perceptions here are Intellections of the
dimmer order, and the Intellections There are vivid perceptions.
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